08 November 2011 in Media
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Recently New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell commented that industrial relations debate was the ‘new McCarthyism’ in Australia. In other words whenever anyone raises a legitimate point about industrial relations the Labor Party screams: ‘they want to bring back WorkChoices!’ Desperate and drowning from their own terrible policy failures, this Labor Government will try anything.
Unfortunately this false claim has influenced some of those who write Australia's political commentary. For instance, there have been suggestions that some Liberals (myself included) are demanding a return to WorkChoices or something like it. These suggestions are wrong but are central to the scare campaign. No-one in the Liberal Party wants to return to ‘WorkChoices’. We all agree that the removal of the no-disadvantage test (the nub of WorkChoices) went too far.
However there is a very live debate in the community about the Labor Party’s changes and the damage they are doing to the Australian economy. I have actively participated in this debate because this is an important area of our economy and if we don’t get it right our prosperity will be put at risk.
Labor will always do what the unions want because they are the union. Eighty per cent of South Australian Labor members in the Federal Parliament are former union officials so we shouldn’t be surprised that they will write laws for the unions.
The recent Qantas dispute is a very good example of the problems with the Labor laws. They have handed too much power to the union bosses. It is for this reason Qantas was forced to take extra-ordinary measures last weekend to end the dispute.
But it is not just Qantas who are facing this action, the wharves have been shut down in recent weeks, BHP and its workers are in the midst of a major dispute in Queensland and even the Bureau of Meteorology has faced shut downs in recent times. Big disputes are back and it is because Labor changed the law to allow them. Julia Gillard’s laws are operating as intended.
Don’t take my word for it, one of Australia’s most respected policy observers, Paul Kelly, wrote yesterday that ‘The Fair Work Act has changed the industrial relations culture and bargaining in three critical respects. First, it shifts statutory powers from employers to unions. Non-union enterprise agreements are virtually impossible. Individual contracts are banned. Union-run enterprise agreements are the name of the game’.
There are real problems with the so-called Fair Work Act and it should be possible to have a reasonable debate, reported fairly about fixing those changes. Instead all we see from Labor is a pathetic outdated scare campaign in an attempt to conjure up political demons from the past.
Tony Abbott is spot on to say that the Liberal Party will have a clear and specific policy at the next election that is not ideological but addresses problems with the current system. There are many.
The workplace system needs to be balanced, the current system is not and that is causing immense damage.